Food seen around town – Pure Taqueria and Uncle Julio’s fajitas

My last visit to Pure Taqueria was so successful, people at work were wanting me to make another food run. And if I were going to do that, I thought it worthwhile to eat there myself. This is the one new dish I tried:

They call it tres ceviche, with shrimp, fish, and octopus in each of the three containers.  I took most of this dish back to work, and it disappeared around 5 pm. Delicious.

Later this weekend, we went to the new Uncle Julio’s in Sandy Springs. Our timing couldn’t have been worse, as three large groups arrived before we did and the wait was quite long. And after the food arrived, I had the joy of watching my mother-in-law take the long strips of chicken fajita meat and steadily cut them into thin 1.5 inch long strips that would have been suited for a stir fry, perfectly sized for chop sticks. She was persistent in her resizing, even though she didn’t have any chop sticks.

These are Uncle Julio’s beef fajitas. I’m guessing, given the grain of the meat, that they are using something like flank. The fajitas are really good, though they arrived without a hint of steam or smoke and the onions are just turning transparent, let alone caramelized. So on taste, they are an A. On presentation, maybe a B.

Uncle Julio’s has good pork ribs (my wife had a plate they call a Juarez, a mix of fajitas and ribs) and an interesting tomato based sauce. And in fact, most of the dishes the waiters will steer you to are grilled foods. This restaurant is more like Outback or Longhorns than I realized at first.

 

Bittman – 101 quick starters for Thanksgiving

If you’re a regular NY Times reader, you probably won’t have missed this, but to remind me (and give a link I can pass on to family), I’ll note that Mark Bittman, author of “How to Cook Everything”, has a list of 101 easy starters to make for Thanksgiving. The other comment, more of a tip, is that good newspapers have a “printable” mode for long articles, that you can find. If you use it, it’s far more readable as all the text ends up on one page and almost all the ads go away.

 

Uncle Julio’s Fine Mexican Food, Sandy Springs GA

Uncle Julio’s is a chain that started in Dallas and is, in general, respected there and well appreciated by Texas expats.  And to make it clear, this is a border food restaurant. It says so explicitly on their catering truck. It says so implicitly in their choice of words and spellings, such as sopapilla instead of sopaipa. The former is used in what the Wikipedia calls the New Mexican style of sopapilla.

This particular Uncle Julio’s, a Sandy Springs location, opened Tuesday, November 18th. I actually dropped by on the 17th and they were handing out $10 discounts for showing up early. And I missed opening day, only to come back the next day. There was a large, but not overwhelming crowd. I managed to get a window seat and waited for the food. If I haven’t said already, it looks pretty good inside, the dominant elements (other than a very large amount of glass) are wood and plaster, with a whole lot of photos on the wall – vaqueros, mothers, sons, many still lifes. There are cow horns tacked on the wall and other indications that this didn’t come out of, oh, an environment such as Mexico City.

Waiters are well dressed, in white shirts and black aprons and ties. I asked some questions about fajitas (no, he didn’t know the meat they used on their fajitas. Yes, he did know that even at lunch, fajitas come out on metal plates), but drifted to the quail. Quail are what my globetrotting brother insists on when my family gets together for Christmas every year. Whether he come in from Stockholm, Berlin, Santiago, or Beijing, as regular as clockwork he wants his quail. So I couldn’t resist. Grilled quail is what I ordered.

First came a chipotle salsa and dry chips. The chipotle was rich in flavor and had a decent bite to it. The chips were excellent.

The quail, when it arrived, came on metal, but it really was a heavy duty plastic plate with a metal liner. This thing is much easier for a waiter to handle than a comal, and when it arrived, the plate was hot. The quail were flattened. I wasn’t quite used to that but the taste didn’t change. The quail were tasty and  tender and the grilled flavor came through. The grilled jalapeño looked so good I ate it. And it was fairly mild (as jalapeños go) until the very last bite, which packed a surprising punch. Delicious though.

The Spanish rice was good. The beans were rich in flavor but had too much salt for my tastes. I ordered extra pico de gallo and it was pretty good as well, though the tomato chunks had that “shipped green” feeling, hardly grown on the vine. The tortillas were good, and exceptionally soft. I was scooping up my sides and making soft tacos out of them.

About this time a group of 99X staffers showed up on a table next to mine. It was pretty obvious, as one of them had a station shirt on with the word STAFF in large letters. It was kind of fun, as this is one of the stations I listen to. I was also almost done at the moment, but managed to be talked into Uncle Julio’s sopapillas.

They’re cute. Smaller than I’m used to, they sometimes don’t open well and make it harder to pour honey inside. But yes, I felt almost transported back to Texas.

Verdict: Quality Tejano food at reasonable prices. Highly recommended.

Uncle Julio’s Fine Mexican Food
1140 Hammond Drive
Sandy Springs, GA 30328
(678) 736-8260

 

A touch of bitter

Coffee and tea are probably the most common sources of a bitter taste in most people’s diets. Beers can be bitter, as can certain additives in fancy cocktails (such as Angostura bitters). For older folks, a common bitter flavor is the aftertaste of a chlorhexidine rinse. But Chinese foods also use bitter tastes, such as this beef with bitter melon in black bean sauce, from Canton Cooks:

To note, bitter melon is quite bitter, but hardly in the same league as chlorhexidine. The most interesting bitter flavor I’ve run into recently is Chinese broccoli. If you go to Ming’s Bar BQ and order a dish rich with broccoli, they’ll ask, “leaf broccoli or crown broccoli?”, or perhaps “Chinese broccoli or crown broccoli?” The Chinese product has a stem and a large dark green leaf, and a very mild bitter flavor. I’d say the dominant flavor and textures I note in Chinese broccoli are the freshness of the green vegetable and the sweetness of it.  The combination of green freshness, sweetness, and a bitter so mild it could be a bubblegum flavor are an interesting and refreshing combination.

Have you encountered an interesting flavor combination recently? Care to post about it?

 

F2O Fresh 2 Order, Sandy Springs, GA

F2O is a chain, with seven locations in two states, and it’s one with quite a decent reputation. The one I’ll be describing is on Roswell Road near Hilderbrand Drive. It’s a nice looking place on the outside and a nice looking restaurant on the inside.

Despite the looks, the layout of this restaurant leaves certain things to be desired. Service? You stand in line and order. Once finished, they give you an oversized flag to take to your table. Seating? It’s cramped, seats so close if there were two of me side by side (very possible in this restaurant), my elbows would clash. Privacy? Forget it. The seating has been deliberately arranged so that people must look at other diners in very many circumstances. This place would be a seating and privacy nightmare if full.

The crowd was largely female when I showed. There were a few men, mostly in starched collars and business shirts. Women were largely attractively dressed. No Blackberries, no PDAs, no patrons with heads buried behind a laptop screen. Phones, yes, but no sign this restaurant had anything of an IT crowd.

While standing in line, you can pull out a placemat sized menu and you can also read one of the many signs announcing specials. Their blackened tilapia looked attractive but I ended up settling on their chicken tortilla soup and their grilled salmon.

Both were exceptionally good. The chicken had grill marks and the chunks were pretty big. The soup tasted fresh and the half bowl serving just the amount I wanted. The salmon serving (3/4 size) had a salad with baby greens and an excellent side, the wheat berry rice. The rice was peppered with the brown grains of wheat, and bits of stuff that was rounder. Perhaps the spheres were broken wheat, or maybe couscous. The salmon itself had a sweetish sauce and was topped with corn and nuts. The salad had fresh tender greens and perhaps too much dressing. The greens didn’t need that much flavor, they were good enough to stand on their own.

It’s nice to say that the best part of this meal was the meal itself.

Verdict: Trendy, attractive and fast, this place gets you in and out with some flair. Highly recommended for the food.

F2O
6125 Roswell Road
Sandy Springs, GA 30328
(404) 567-8646

 

Jovalto’s Cafe, Grayson GA

Jovalto’s is a smallish cafe in a Kroger shopping center on Grayson Highway. I ran into it while doing business with Comcast, which has a brick and mortar store in the same strip mall. From Webb Ginn Road, simply head north until it ends. Turn right and continue until you see the Kroger strip mall on your right. Couldn’t be simpler to get there.

Jovaltos’ calls itself an American/Caribbean fusion restaurant. They have some island favorites, but also hot dogs and hamburgers, and varieties of wings, in jerk spice or hot sauce.  They also have $3.99 lunch specials and savings available during lunch hours during the day.

Steaming hot jerk chicken plate.

I tried their jerk chicken plate, which was steaming hot when it arrived. It’s a wet jerk, and with a very nice level of spicing. Hard to notice when you start, the jerk builds to a decent level of heat as you eat. Jovalto’s uses chicken breasts, and you can see them being grilled when you enter, as their grill is visible to the eye.

The plate leaves you with a salad, a bit of dessert, and the jerk plate, which had the chicken, some fried plantains, and peas and rice. It was a good deal, I thought, given the amount of food on your plate. And it’s a cleaner place than many, with decent service.

Verdict: Nice little Caribbean restaurant, nice wet jerk chicken. Highly recommended.

Jovalto’s Cafe
1911 Grayson Highway
Grayson, GA 30017
(770) 559-1405

 

Pancit

As Filipinos came to the island of Guam, they brought along some of their foods. Lumpia are common on Guam now, and when I was there, pancit could be found in almost any village-wide fiesta, and most of the combination gas station-store-restaurants that pepper the island. There are many different kinds of pancit. To give you a feel for the various recipes, we’ll list six (here, here, here, here, here, and here). Of these, the version by Chaos in the Kitchen more closely seems to resemble what my family can cook locally.

The noodle I’m more used to is a larger yellow noodle, but my sister-in-law has been getting good results with rice stick noodles, which we found at Assi Supermercado (as my wife says, “look for the shrimp”).

This results in a much lighter product, as below.

Home made pancit.

If there is anything I’d love to see in a Filipino restaurant in Atlanta, it would be a good pancit. I miss it far more than lumpia.

 

Lee’s Pho – banh mi at Assi Food Court, Duluth GA

Lee’s Pho is one of the shops in the Food Court of Assi Supermercado in Duluth, and one easily overlooked in the wash of Chinese noodle shops and bulgogi on a bun. But I had a reader note that banh mi could be found in Assi, and that was enough to make me want to try the sandwich at this shop.

The sandwich I chose goes by the letter-number designation of “S3″, though that seemed to confuse the staff. “Pork sandwich” worked much better. On the take out menu it’s called a charbroiled pork sandwich and is decently sized when it arrived. They’re reasonably cheap, $3 each, and the sixth one is free if you order 5. To feed a family of six two sandwiches each would cost just $30.00.

I got my sandwich late enough I wasn’t expecting excellence. The bread seemed a little sweet and was good, but wasn’t the perfection you get when the bread comes right out of the oven. The pork was cold but tasty. There was a bit of a yellow condiment (probably mustard), pork, a white vegetable and plenty of jalapeño slices. Yes, not the perfection of a banh mi straight out of the oven on Buford Highway, but a lot of balance and plenty good. And it’s close to where I live, less than 15 minutes away by car. And if I want to bring lunch to work, this is an easy stop along the way.

Lee’s Pho
1630 Pleasant Hill Road, #A1
Duluth, GA 30096
(770) 931-8868

 

Donut King, Snellville GA

Donut King is a Mom and Pop donut shop near the corner of 78 and Scenic Highway (124), just north of 78, with enough of a following to drift into Snellville’s top 10 at times. It has early bird hours, opening at 5:30 am and closing at 1 pm. This is why we hadn’t visited until recently, as my wife is an afternoon donut buyer, eating them the next day for breakfast.

The look outside is spartan.

The look inside is spartan as well, with a couple tables, some stand up refrigerators with drinks, a display cabinet for the donuts, and the Donut King and Queen. This day, the Queen seemed more in charge than his Highness, who was largely in the back cooking food. I ordered two cream filled donuts, two lemon and two strawberry filled donuts.

They also had pigs in a blanket, or PIBs.

The PIBs were bits of sausage in a very soft bread, and they didn’t last. The cream filled turned out to have a white cream, as opposed to a yellow “custard” filling. So the offerings are pretty spartan as well. But it’s open before the sun comes up, and the crowds lined up to get a couple donuts with coffee, or perhaps orange juice, don’t seem to be going away.

Verdict: Mom n’ Pop donut shop. Decent product. Recommended.

Donut King
2250 Scenic Highway
Snellville, GA 30078-6152
(770) 978-8069

 

Henry’s Louisiana Grill, Acworth GA

I’ve been ill for at least two weeks, cooped up at home. The symptoms have begun to ease up, and so I had the itch to try a place I normally couldn’t get to. John Bickford and Malika Harricharan have both been to Henry’s Louisiana Grill and thought highly of this eatery (see reviews here and here). I grew up partly in Louisiana. Some of my youth and almost all of my teens years were spent there, and there are few things I like as much as a simple crawfish étouffeé. So, time to crawl for some Louisiana food, and check out Henry’s.

To note, in Louisiana, places like Baton Rouge and New Orleans are not really Cajun country. New Orleans is Creole land, the place where Cajun and European and African influences mixed and created a sophisticated urban cuisine. Cajun country is more out in the swamps, in places with names like Breaux Bridge, but largely south of I-10, east of Lake Charles, and west of the Mississippi River. It’s a rural cuisine, simpler and more “whole pig” honest. It’s also rich and spicy, and although rich foods do not scare Atlantans, spicy foods do. To my tastes, about half of the restaurants in Atlanta that call themselves Creole or Cajun are whole “I can’t talk about them because they’re so bad” busts, largely over inadequate spicing.

It’s a bit of a drive to get to Henry’s. Head north on I-75 about 15 miles past the intersection of 75 and 285. Exit the interstate you get to exit 277. At the intersection, head left. Stick on this road until you reach Main Street. Turn right. Eventually, you’ll see what looks like a renovated strip of buildings on the left, and Henry’s will be among those.

Ambience – It’s one thing to buy Mardi Gras masks and party beads to decorate a place. It’s yet another to know enough of the history of Louisiana sports to understand Billy Cannon’s place in college football. One of his jerseys is there, along with newspaper articles of the LSU Sugar Bowl win over Oklahoma. And yes, there are posters and New Orleans memorabilia, and some nice jazz that flows from all the speakers. Waiters dress in black tops and pants, sometimes with white undershirts. I think they look elegant, myself. I see a lot of tag team waiter work. About three people helped me at my table at one time or another, from the bartender on down.

On the tables there are plenty of hot sauces, at least two from New Iberia, the hot sauce capital of Louisiana.

Freebies

Bread and cornbread – Cornbread to be preferred. There is a hint of spice in their yellow cornbread, enough that I asked for a refill.

Appetizers

left: red beans and rice, front: shrimp creole, right: gumbo.

Red Beans and Rice – Spot on for the most part. Sausage used compliments the beans, decent spicing. I can understand why, after letting this sit on my tongue, why John Bickford comes back to this dish again and again.

Gumbo – Not sure I actually had the gumbo, as there really was no liquid to speak of and no okra either. A lot of rice, chicken, and sausage and perhaps some beans. But the flavor wasn’t the same as the red beans and rice. A good dish, but not a gumbo as I know and remember gumbos.

Creole – Best of the appetizers, a nice tomato flavor, good tasting shrimp and decent spicing. This probably would be an entrée choice for me next time.

Entrée

Étouffeé – A hole in the spicing, somehow. Lacked a certain richness. It could be the seasoning, it could be a lack of crawfish fat, but in part was surely a lack of coordinated heat. In this kind of cooking, you really want a cornucopia of peppers in the dish, and not too much of any one of them. Heat should flow over the tongue from the back of the mouth to the tip, and there should be a lingering aftertaste, more black pepper sizzle than cayenne fire. You can get that if you spice the dish yourself, but that isn’t the point when you go to a Louisiana themed restaurant.  I did a brief review of spicing a Cajun dish. This dish isn’t a fail but neither is it a success.

Dessert

Delicious

Bread Pudding – Some sweetness and hints of cinnamon, raisins used to good effect, a dish that was quite tasty and one I usually dislike.

Overall, this is a place with hits and misses. I wish I had read Malika’s review more thoroughly, as the Ooh La La appears to be Henry’s signature dish. It just doesn’t sound Creole or Cajun to me, even if it’s good, and the lack of heat puts it outside of my largest interests. Nevertheless, this place has more hits than misses and with a little more courage in their spicing, they could become a lot more consistent. Consequently, I recommend the place.

Henry’s Louisiana Grill
4835 North Main Street, Suite 100
Acworth, GA 30101
(770) 966-1515